As noted by the team at TidBITS, this change in how devices connect to Wi-Fi may be related to the apparent battery drain. "Our speculation, based on some quick testing that Michael Cohen did, is that the problem is related to a change in Wi-Fi behavior, which maps with Apple's sole release note for iOS 6.0.2," Engst wrote. "[I]t's far from conclusive, but indicates that the problem may be related to wireless communication in some fashion."

Members of the Apple Support Communities are also seeing this phenomenon on their iPhones, but at least one user named .zaph. has a different theory on what's going on. "Quick update on this, I'm still letting my phone drain before I charge it again. It's been sitting at four percent for a few hours now (mostly idling)," .zaph. wrote. "I have a feeling the phone is confused about how much power is actually left. Once it drains and recharges to 100 percent in one sitting, it should know better and am anticipating it getting better then."

I've been watching my iPhone's battery life since performing the iOS 6.0.2 update and have not seen any noticeable change in behavior. But that doesn't mean you haven't: let us know if your battery is draining faster after the update in the poll below, then tell us your theories in the comments.

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Jacqui Cheng
Jacqui is an Editor at Large at Ars Technica, where she has spent the last eight years writing about Apple culture, gadgets, social networking, privacy, and more. Emailjacqui@arstechnica.com//Twitter@eJacqui

Good thing I didn't update yet. I have been burned more than once like this in some other cases. That's why imo it's good to wait a week with updating your gadgets. With software it's ok, since rolling back to a previous version is a non-issue.

I had a battery drain problem a while ago - ended up being a corrupt calendar item that was choking iCloud, and causing it to sync constantly (and therefore always use the cellular radio, getting hot, draining the battery, and using more data than normal).

I learned a lot in the process of troubleshooting the problem, and I documented what I learned here:

This might be helpful for people who are experiencing a similar issue. I make no guarantees that it will solve the problem, but it worked for me, and the general iPhone troubleshooting steps (especially making use of the Diagnostic and Usage Data logs that are available on your iPhone, that you might not have been aware of) helped me a lot, and I hope they might be helpful to someone else, too.

Oh, and for the record, I updated to iOS 6.0.2 yesterday on my iPhone 5, and haven't noticed any battery drain issues (and I'm particularly sensitive to that after what I recently went through).

It seems like they keep going back and forth with updates draining battery and fixing battery drain issues. Is it REALLY that hard to test it out on an iPhone and see how the battery holds up before pushing the build to prod.

(I have no Apple devices here, this is just curiosity. I just can't help wondering if there's a connection there, or if a fix for the referenced 6.0 heat problem - changing the forced shutdown conditions/thresholds, for example - could result in these new observations.)

I had a severe battery drain issue on my iPhone 4 - battery was completely dead in just a couple of hours instead of my usual 50% or so remaining when I plug it in at the end of the day.

I was able to correct this by deleting and re-configuring my email accounts. It seems like something was causing it to try to sync constantly.

We have seen this quite a bit with our iphone users that sync to our Google Apps environment and with iCloud. Removing our account did nothing... But removing the iCloud connection fixed the issue. When they re-create the icloud connection everything seems fine, but after a couple of weeks or a month this same battery drain issue will pop up again.

I seriously doubt it is really related to the update, and is most likely an issue with something in their icloud syncing...

I haven't done 6.0.2 yet, still on 6.0.1, but I did have a weird battery drain issue the other night. Generally my 5 has handled battery life remarkably better than my wife's 4s.

However, I went to bed with battery life at roughly 60% and woke up with it stone cold dead. First time it has ever happened. Not sure if it got in to some kind of synch loop like some others have described, or what. Never done anything like that before and he hasn't happened since (3 days ago and today after charging overnight it sits at 94% after an hour of quiet music listening via speakers and a little messaging and email + about 6hrs of standby and 10 minutes of talk time).

I don't own Apple products, but the rest of my workplace does. They've reported massive battery drain issues on the 4S and higher than normal on the 5. I'll recommend some of these fixes to them and see if that works.

I voted "Other" because I hadn't yet installed the iOS 6.0.2 update, and checking for it now neither my iPhone 4 or iPad 4 are seeing the updates OTA, nor did iTunes see the update for my iPad (didn’t check my iPhone with iTunes yet). So maybe Apple has acknowledged this issue and done everyone who hadn’t yet updated a favor by pulling the update.

My iPhone 4 did not get this update. I did have huge battery problems this week, and I was about to order a replacement battery for my iPhone 4, because it would drop battery dramatically (as in, 60% when I get in the car at work (no bluetooth, no cellular data), an hour later I'm home and it's stone cold dead. I was browsing the web and the battery percentage went down one percent at a time like it was a countdown clock...

Did a restore from an itunes backup, and reset all the accounts and such. Either way I need(ed) it fixed.

Then this morning after charging it, I used it for a few minutes and it stayed at 100% the whole time.

Haven't really used it today but I'm at 90% now. Let's hope it stays that way.

Usually I can go 2 or 3 days without recharging, which is one of the things that I love about my iPhone, so this was troubling. Although I expect the battery to crap out at some point, I've had this phone for 20 months now.

Honestly, I'm a little surprised people have the ability to tell their battery life has changed. It's a function of what you're doing with it right? Of course you're not going to get the typical 18 hours you'd normally get if watching movies waiting for your airplane to start bording.

That's not even including apps that keep Location Services constantly, on, or apps that can be scheduled to authenticate and download frequently (e-mail, social networks, etc).

Honestly, I'm a little surprised people have the ability to tell their battery life has changed. It's a function of what you're doing with it right? Of course you're not going to get the typical 18 hours you'd normally get if watching movies waiting for your airplane to start bording.

That's not even including apps that keep Location Services constantly, on, or apps that can be scheduled to authenticate and download frequently (e-mail, social networks, etc).

/shrug

Wel, take for instance my use case I outlined above: phone is charged more than 50%), not used for an hour, and stone cold dead (as in: have to connect to charger and wait a few minutes to even get a charging icon on the screen). I sure hope regular battery life for phones is not measured as 2 hours standby (50% battery / 1 hour). I found that pretty dramatic...

Honestly, I'm a little surprised people have the ability to tell their battery life has changed. It's a function of what you're doing with it right? Of course you're not going to get the typical 18 hours you'd normally get if watching movies waiting for your airplane to start bording.

That's not even including apps that keep Location Services constantly, on, or apps that can be scheduled to authenticate and download frequently (e-mail, social networks, etc).

/shrug

Wel, take for instance my use case I outlined above: phone is charged more than 50%), not used for an hour, and stone cold dead (as in: have to connect to charger and wait a few minutes to even get a charging icon on the screen). I sure hope regular battery life for phones is not measured as 2 hours standby (50% battery / 1 hour). I found that pretty dramatic...

(note that my issue was not related to this specific update).

A bunch of people on here are talking about it using like 10% more than normal. I don't track my own usage well enough to ever know if that's me or the phone.

I installed 6.02 on my iPhone 5 the day it came out. I haven't added an app or changed a setting in over a week. It's 3:30PM here now, and I have 85% remaining. My phone comes off the charger at about 6:30 AM pretty well like clockwork. All radios are on, LTE is in use (AT&T), and I have 4 email accounts on push, and several apps backgrounding. I don't micromanage apps.

Now, what I have seen is my wifi signal meeter seems to show less available signal. I always see full bars pretty much no matter where I am in the house, but since the patch I see one bar less even when fairly close to the router. (it's on 5GHZ N through an AirPort Extremel Base station). I do not believe the base station has received a patch recently, though my wife's mac handles that, so maybe she pushed on if prompted to do so, I'll have to check.

I do know we're having local tower issues, and whatever it is also seems to be impacting my DSL conection, at home both peg out at a max 2mbit down but with seemingly no impact to upspeed, and prior to a few weeks ago, my downspeed was 99% reliable at over 6mbit, and LTE ran over 20mbit with 4 bars (now 0-1 bar), but it is only my home connection that's effected, so perhaps the internet bottleneck is causing other issues with my home wifi, it works perfectly at work and other places.

They still haven't fixed the bug introduced in 6.0 that heats up the phone, causing it to force shutdown itself every so often.

You should get your phone looked at if it is getting so hot that it has to shut itself down with normal usage.

Went into the store and did the check. This is specifically an IOS issue, not a hardware issue.

No. If it was an iOS issue unrelated to hardware, then if they flashed a clean ROM on your device it would have fixed it. That, or everyone's phone would be heating up. It's possible a software issue may be present only on some phones with hardware defects, but they shoudl have thus replaced your phone if the issue continued.

Running a little wrarm, but within tolerences is one thing. Shutting down and triggering errors is clearly outside tolerance, and if it was not resolved after flashing the ROM, it shoudl have been replaced on the spot. Go back to the store. Make sure you deal with a different Genius. Tell the manager once they resolve your issue you want some additional compensation for having to come back twice, and for having to deal with the issue in the interim (they'll probably give you not less than a $50 iTunes card, maybe more). Did they even connect your phone and run diagnostics and flash it, or did they just tell you what they "thought" the issue was. Was it an apple store, or some other random outklet you never shoudl have brought the phone to?

I voted "Other" because I hadn't yet installed the iOS 6.0.2 update, and checking for it now neither my iPhone 4 or iPad 4 are seeing the updates OTA, nor did iTunes see the update for my iPad (didn’t check my iPhone with iTunes yet). So maybe Apple has acknowledged this issue and done everyone who hadn’t yet updated a favor by pulling the update.

The update only applies to iPhone 5s and iPad minis and iPad 4s. If you have never connected one of those to iTunes, it won't look for updates to those products. You won't get this patch apparantly.

Haven't updated my devices yet. This is exactly why I wait for complaints about iOS updates. My 4s already has the crappiest battery life of all my recently owned iphones, I don't want it to get worse.

It seems like they keep going back and forth with updates draining battery and fixing battery drain issues. Is it REALLY that hard to test it out on an iPhone and see how the battery holds up before pushing the build to prod.

3rd party software and various carrier variants, yes, that makes that very hard. Ask the android community, battery issues plage this platform like there's no tomorrow. had to get rid of the Evo $g because about every 5-10 days it would decide it would do something in the background (whatever it was, we don't know, no process managers every showed the odd activity), and by 9AM it would be hot in my pocket and drained to 20-30% battery. SGS II also woudl some days be 80% when I leave work, other days 30%, seemingly for no reason (the only 2 apps used on it are email and a MAAS360, my use of it is highly consistant yet battery life is not because that Android was owned by the company, not me). Now I have a One X and it's also been inconsistant (though it's big battery makes it livable and it's not had wild swings). We've had issues with HTC Designs, SGS IIIs, Droid Rasors, and even Nexus devices, battery life in android is simply inconsistant. Letting 3rd party apps have full independent background control is a likely culprit, but not the only issue. Apple does a bit better by using centralized services for most background tasks, and its battery drain issues have been predictable, easy to find, and corrected quickly. I'd rather have that than guess what my phones doing.

They still haven't fixed the bug introduced in 6.0 that heats up the phone, causing it to force shutdown itself every so often.

You should get your phone looked at if it is getting so hot that it has to shut itself down with normal usage.

Went into the store and did the check. This is specifically an IOS issue, not a hardware issue.

No. If it was an iOS issue unrelated to hardware, then if they flashed a clean ROM on your device it would have fixed it. That, or everyone's phone would be heating up. It's possible a software issue may be present only on some phones with hardware defects, but they shoudl have thus replaced your phone if the issue continued.

Running a little wrarm, but within tolerences is one thing. Shutting down and triggering errors is clearly outside tolerance, and if it was not resolved after flashing the ROM, it shoudl have been replaced on the spot. Go back to the store. Make sure you deal with a different Genius. Tell the manager once they resolve your issue you want some additional compensation for having to come back twice, and for having to deal with the issue in the interim (they'll probably give you not less than a $50 iTunes card, maybe more). Did they even connect your phone and run diagnostics and flash it, or did they just tell you what they "thought" the issue was. Was it an apple store, or some other random outklet you never shoudl have brought the phone to?

Apple Store. They flashed, everything is fine. As soon as it was updated to IOS 6, it heats up. It is a simply an IOS issue. And yes, there are literally TONS of reports of people's phones over heating since they upgrade to IOS 6.

I was just hoping the Apple would actually fix that horrible bug by now.